I’m going to reach out to historians and others focused on the factors driving environmental cleanups in the past to see if there’s any evidence that today’s polluting nations can somehow accelerate their journey along what some economists call the “Environmental Kuznets Curve,” a pattern described well in 2003 by David I. Stern, an economist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute:

The environmental Kuznets curve is a hypothesized relationship between various indicators of environmental degradation and income per capita. In the early stages of economic growth degradation and pollution increase, but beyond some level of income per capita (which will vary for different indicators) the trend reverses, so that at high-income levels economic growth leads to environmental improvement.

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By 2050 or so, the human population is expected to pass nine billion. Those billions will be seeking food, water and other resources on a planet where humans are already shaping climate and the web of life. Dot Earth was created by Andrew Revkin in October 2007 -- in part with support from a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship -- to explore ways to balance human needs and the planet's limits.